Anthony Cheung Composer
Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Described as “gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” (San Francisco Chronicle) and praised for its “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), his music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre.
His music has been commissioned and performed by leading groups such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the LA and New York Philharmonics, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Yarn/Wire, AMOC*, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and many others. From 2015–2017, he was the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra. He is the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Rome Prize, and received First Prize at the 2008 Dutilleux Competition.
Cheung’s premieres in fall 2024 include works for the Parker Quartet with Fleur Barron, JACK Quartet, the Sounds of US festival at the Kennedy Center, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. His recordings include five portrait discs: All Roads (New Focus, 2022), Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022), Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). His music and performances have also appeared on Warner Classics (performed by Bertrand Chamayou), Tzadik, and Mode. As a performer and advocate for new music, he was a co-founder, pianist, and artistic director of the Talea Ensemble.
Anthony received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He previously taught at the University of Chicago and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses on topics ranging from theory and composition to the jazz orchestra and Asian musical modernisms.